


Unbowed

by SpaceWall



Category: Star Wars Original Trilogy, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy, Star Wars: Rebels
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst with a Happy Ending, F/M, Galactic Senate (Star Wars), Grief/Mourning, Imperial Era, Isolation, Loneliness, Padmé Amidala Lives, Rebellion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-26
Updated: 2021-03-05
Packaged: 2021-03-17 19:48:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 7,221
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29722329
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SpaceWall/pseuds/SpaceWall
Summary: Padmé Amidala wakes up in the hospital and learns her child is dead, her husband has fallen, and the system she fought so hard to save is broken. She does not give in. Under the watchful eyes of her senate colleagues, she never surrenders.--About six months after E day, Amidala stopped mourning, stopped matching Vader. She went out and spent an exorbitant amount of money – her family was wealthy, she was a senator, and she had a queen’s pension – on an entirely new wardrobe. There was no black or white, and none of the queenly, regal dignity people had come to associate with her. She dressed like a bird, trying to grab the attention of the nearest mate: blue and green and silver, purple and gold, massive earrings in the shape of solar systems. She dyed her hair gold. She ensured the eyes of the world were on her at all times.Vader started leaving every room she entered, rather than the other way around.
Relationships: Padmé Amidala & Leia Organa, Padmé Amidala & Luke Skywalker, Padmé Amidala & Obi-Wan Kenobi, Padmé Amidala/Anakin Skywalker
Comments: 28
Kudos: 103





	1. Captivity

**Author's Note:**

> CW/TW: assumed death of a child in childbirth (Luke+Leia, but, well, you know how this bit of the story goes). A lot of social isolation.

Everyone was surprised when Senator Amidala re-emerged, three weeks after E-day, wearing a demure black dress and veil. She moved gingerly, as if she’d recently been injured, snuck off to the ‘fresher at odd moments, and generally said very little. Most of the Senators who had been known to be closest to the Jedi – Organa, Amidala, Chuchi, to name a few – were either dead, or had gone home to lick their wounds in peace. 

But Amidala had come back, and even if it was obvious that she was defeated, defanged, a shadow of her former self, she was alive, and that meant something to someone. 

\--

Padmé woke up, in the medical centre, and Anakin was there. He told her that he’d rescued her, that they’d lost the child. He asked her about Obi-Wan and she told him, quite honestly, that she didn’t remember. He told her that he’d killed Obi-Wan to get to her, and she swore never to speak to him again. She cursed his name and they both screamed at each other until her voice was hoarse. His voice, modulated by the computer, was always hoarse.

She thought, later, that Palpatine had probably only allowed her to live because the rejection hurt Vader more, and was more controllable, than her death would have been. 

\--

The general consensus was that Vader had probably killed Skywalker and Kenobi. It seemed like the most logical conclusion to draw from the way Amidala looked at him, expression like ice, and the way she left whenever he walked into the room. The first few months, they seemed almost like a matched set. The Emperor’s horrible enforcer in his black suit and cape, and Amdiala in her black satin dress, with black roses in her hair. Both of them looked as if they were the only two members of a uniformed guard. They made a nice contrast with the white armor of the clones. 

\--

She was keenly aware, from the very beginning, that there would be some sort of rebellion against the empire. She had to believe that there would be. But there would be no telling her about it, no participating in it. She knew Vader and Palpatine both were watching her vigilantly. Padmé pushed all those she truly cared about, those few who were left – Bail, her sister – away, and hoped that this would keep them safe. 

\--

About six months after E day, Amidala stopped mourning, stopped matching Vader. She went out and spent an exorbitant amount of money – her family was wealthy, she was a senator, and she had a queen’s pension – on an entirely new wardrobe. There was no black or white, and none of the queenly, regal dignity people had come to associate with her. She dressed like a bird, trying to grab the attention of the nearest mate: blue and green and silver, purple and gold, massive earrings in the shape of solar systems. She dyed her hair gold. She ensured the eyes of the world were on her at all times. 

Vader started leaving every room she entered, rather than the other way around. 

\--

Padmé thought she was one of very few people who knew that Bail and Breha’s beautiful baby girl was adopted. He’d told her about the impossibility of them conceiving, no matter how badly they wanted children. But they didn’t make it public knowledge, and they kept little Leia’s circumstances very private, in general. That was probably a good decision. No child deserved to be raised with the eyes of the galaxy on her, Padmé knew from personal experience. No matter how much she’d loved being queen, she never would have asked it of any child of hers. 

She sent him some selection of the things she might have gotten for her own child – had Anakin even told her their sex? She didn’t think he had and hated the idea that she might have forgotten – a mobile like the Alderaanian solar system, sensible mess-resistant clothing, some educational toys she remembered from her own childhood, and privately thought of that as a goodbye.

\--

Senator Amidala always seemed to be re-elected in a landslide, which was shocking for a number of reasons. Most particularly because nobody was sure what, exactly, she did. She didn’t seem to put forward resolutions or participate in the democratic process in any particular way. But she did attend the senate functions, rub shoulders with the galaxy’s rich and powerful, and look more gorgeous each passing day – she has just turned thirty, did you know? – while doing it.

\--

She wasn’t sure if it was Palpatine or Vader who was doing it, slowly isolating her even further than she already had been. The last of her handmaidens, disappearing one by one, Jar Jar losing his representative position, even her secretary being reassigned. It was a petty, passive-aggressive thing to do, and she was sick of it, either way. She waited for an appropriate moment, and confronted Vader. 

Well, confrontation is a strong word. All she did was go up to him, put her hand on his arm, and say, “the disappearances? I’d like them to stop now. A good secretary is hard to come by.”

Her secretary was returned to her service the very next morning, and her question of whether Vader or Palpatine had been responsible for the initial disappearances remained unanswered.

\--

The general consensus of the rumour mill was that Padmé Amidala had been married, to someone, at some point. The ring she wore on a chain around her neck – like someone had died – confirmed that. She’d carried it, steadfastly and publicly, for nearly a decade. It was odd, though, that she didn’t seem to date. And the other senators had tried. Even though she no-longer associated with her former colleagues, those she had worked with during the height of the clone war, there were still many from all political allegiances in the Senate who saw and admired her beauty, grace, and intellect.

The suitors included a wide assortment of genders and species. It was known that Amidala often accepted first dates, in a public place, but only if you were willing to talk about politics, which was a dangerous game with the way Vader’s agents watched her, predatory and omnipresent. Some of the older beings in the Senate thought that Amidala was probably looking for someone who was unafraid of him, or had nothing to fear. 

If there had been anyone in the world like that, they were long gone, now. It was a common piece of evidence used by those who argued that Amidala’s long-dead spouse had probably been The Hero With No Fear. Those who thought it was any of a number of other candidates – Kenobi, Windu, Satine Kryze, a clone perhaps – had arguments of their own with just as much sense. 

\--

The only person who ever passed Padmé’s dinner test was Mitth'raw'nuruodo, her ‘old friend’, as he called himself with a sly smile. It was generally agreed that he was smarter than most remaining senators, so this wasn’t surprising. It also probably helped that he had no interest in being a genuine suitor. He wanted information from her. Information about Anakin, information about Palpatine, and information about the fall of the Jedi order. The truth, if possible. She wasn’t particularly inclined to give it to him. She imagined that the consequences of telling the truth would have been ugly for both of them. But she thought that Thrawn knew that too. He didn’t seem to mind. 

They talked about art almost exclusively, which she knew fascinated the senate’s gossips to no end with its unusual deviation from her political standard. But she knew Thrawn well enough to know that art was politics for him, and wanting to know about Nabooian art – Palpatine, after all, being from Naboo – was as close to sedition as he was likely to come on the public stage.

Once, years after his arrival in the Empire, he walked her home and there was a power outage. It was brief, perhaps two minutes in total, and immediately he asked, 

“Skywalker, what happened to him?”

Padmé wondered if he’d been waiting to ask since the day they met again. “Vader happened. That’s all you need to know.”

Thrawn nodded, solemnly, as if some sort of deal had been completed. It had not escaped her notice that Thrawn’s human shadow had been absent on this return to Coruscant for the first time in a long time, perhaps ever.

Thrawn never spoke to her again after that. He had everything he needed from her, and their relationship had always been a transactional one. And he paid his debt, too. One of her watchers – there were often three, Palpatine, Vader, and the Navy – was replaced permanently by a charming young woman called Lirel from the outer rim who accepted no nonsense and took many bribes from the woman she was supposed to be watching to look the other way at key moments. Padmé was perfectly happy to accept this as the gift that it was. In time, she would come to consider Lirel her friend in a genuine way that Thrawn himself had never earned.

\--

Outside of Coruscant, Padmé’s reputation was far less important than it seemed to the self-interested senators and admirals who congregated at the capital.

More than thirteen years after her return to the public scene, Ahsoka Tano scanned a senate gossip column on the holonet and tried to look interested. Amidala was there, at some ball, in a sea blue skirt that looked like gossimer with a flattering corset with silver trim and mother-of-pearl buttons down the side. The usual wedding ring hung on its chain, disappearing between her breasts. On her face was plastered a radiant smile that Ahsoka could tell, though she suspected no one else could, was blisteringly insincere. It had been so long since Padmé had done anything of genuine importance at all that everyone – save for her intimidated suitors – had long since forgotten that she ever did anything else.

That particular picture, in all its gaudy glory, inspired a rage of imitators, and eventually made its way through winding fashion circles, to the gossip-mills of backwater planets across the Galaxy, including Jakku and Tatooine.

\--

The one upside of Vader’s attention to her, all these years later, was that between his and Thrawn’s machinations, Padmé went largely unmolested by most of the dangerous, power-grubbing – and more importantly, selfish – forces of the imperial military and bureaucracy. 

But once, in her fourteenth year after E-day, she was at a party where one of the Moffs got drunk enough to lose his sense. She was wearing her usual sort of costume, performing her usual sort of distraction. Lirel broke his hand half a second before it ever touched her. Even for a spy, this was the sort of breach of decorum that widely would have been considered a bad move. A better spy than Lirel would have stood in the shadows and watched.

Padmé made it part way through suggesting she take the blame – after all, she would have hit him herself if her back had not been turned to him – when Vader threw the man off the balcony with a look. It was less about protecting Padmé at that point (she was perfectly safe and the Moff whimpering on the ground), and more a gesture of good faith. Nobody blamed Lirel for breaking his hand when Vader had broken everything else. His reputation would only benefit by increasing his body count, where she would have seen the inside of a jail cell for what she did.

Padmé nodded at him, an acknowledgement and a thank you, and it seemed to her that the mask inclined towards her in return. 

\--

Unbeknownst to her, Padmé’s shows, the way she drew the eye, had served a powerful tool for various rebel sects over the years. It was easier for them to pass unnoticed when they knew without a shadow of a doubt that every eye in the room (Vader’s included, if he even had eyes under there) was focused on the Senator from Naboo. 

Some sects, those who still had members who knew her, thought that was what she would have wanted for them. Perhaps it was even her aim. Every second of attention given to her was one that neither Imperial glorification nor the hunting of rebels received. But the majority of them, those who were younger, who barely remembered the days of the Clone Wars, when Padmé Amidala had stood and fought, only imagined her as a vapid figure, emblematic of everything wrong with the senate.

\--

She made sure to send Bail’s daughter a note of congratulations on her Day of Demand. It was the right thing to do. She thought, often, about the child that could have been like a sister to her own. Sixteen years old. How long ago had she herself been sixteen? It could as well have been another world. 

When the young Organa girl came to apprentice in the senate, Padmé kept an eye on her, from a wary distance. It seemed the least she could do. Leia Organa looked so much like her at that age, it was almost uncanny. 

It was obvious that Vader had seen it too.

For the first time in sixteen years, he came to her office, and she let him in. The gossips were going to have strokes. She got very drunk for the occasion. Vader didn’t, obviously. 

Vader, in his wheezing way, said, “do you ever think that the Organa girl...”

And Padmé raised her glass to him and said, “you’re the Jedi, aren’t you? It’s your kriffing Force that took them from us.”

He left very quickly after that, and they didn’t speak again, not even in public, for more than a year. 

\--

It was obvious to everyone, even to the most dunderheaded senators, that insurgency against the Empire was rising. The smart ones kept their heads down, or, better, raised their heads high and acted as if nothing was happening. In this respect, it was agreed, Senator Amidala was the wisest of them all. She still dressed like a holo-star and curtsied and smiled at the Emperor like she’d been born to it, as if every day was exactly the same as the one before, peaceful and serene. When they were with her, it was easier to pretend that nothing had changed. Vader had to stop inviting her to the events where he was supposed to be figuring out which Senators were traitors.

\--

Vader brought drinks this time, which was a bad sign. 

“I’ll be very disappointed if this is a ruse to poison me,” she informed him, and took a sip anyways. It was a Nabooian wine, rich and sweet and tasting like their time in the Lake Country. It was her favourite, and she hated that he remembered the things Anakin had known. 

“Thrawn’s pet rathtar wouldn’t let anyone kill you.” It was an apt analogy for Lirel. 

“You let him install her.” 

“It seemed rude to refuse, after all his… hard work.”

She debated what, if any, loyalty she owed to Thrawn. “I didn’t tell him anything important. Just a lot of talk about art and two words about the fate of Anakin Skywalker.”

“I have it on good authority from most of the admiralty that he very rarely remembers to shut up about art. I thought, for some time, that it was a euphemism.”

Did he not want to know what she’d said about him? Perhaps he already knew. She was more than used to going without any real privacy. There was a reason she’d made certain anyone who wanted to date her was willing to accept that. Even now, they probably weren’t alone. If Vader’s agents were absent, that meant Lirel, and Palpatine’s agents, were probably keeping a closer eye than ever. 

As if reading her thoughts – and there was always a distinct possibility that he was, although she tried to protect her mind as best she could – he placed a jammer on the table, and flipped the switch. It made a whirring noise, and the popping sounds of years and years worth of bugs shorting out or in some shoddy cases exploding was truly a symphony for the ages. 

“Ahsoka Tano is alive. I thought you should know.”

It was a gift. Perhaps the only truly selfless gift, without any payment in kind, that Padmé had received since the end of the Clone War. 

“Never tell me anything so important ever again.”

He understood. He only asked one question, before the jammer ended and all the spies on Coruscant descended upon this very room. 

“Anakin Skywalker… what do you think happened to him?”

Not what she’d told Thrawn, but what she believed. 

“I don’t know.”

\--

When it became clear that Vader – Anakin – wasn’t going to kill her, she lay flat in her back on the floor for a while and looked up at the crumbling ceiling. She couldn’t really explain why, it just seemed like the thing to do. 

With a mechanical grinding noise and a hiss, he managed to sit beside her. 

There was a great deal to say, and nothing at all. Ahsoka hated him in a visceral, painful way, and she rather suspected that he hated her too. But he was not killing her. Had not killed her. What was she to make of that?

“How many people know that you’re him?”

That you (Vader) are Anakin Skywalker? That you (Anakin) are Darth Vader?

“The Emperor. Whoever Obi-Wan’s accomplices were all those years ago. You. Thrawn, unfortunately. Padmé. ”

Padmé, trapped all these years at the heart of the empire that Ahsoka was sure she would have hated more than life itself. She knew how much Bail Organa grieved for his friend, even now. They had to consider her as good as dead. It was the only way to live with how they’d all abandoned her. 

“How could she stay with you? After everything?”

“She didn’t stay with me,” Vader corrected, the hitch in his breathing seeming even more pronounced than usual. “She stayed against me. To ensure that I couldn’t forget. To remind me of my shame. Of what we lost.”

“Did it work?”

“More than I care to admit.”

\--

After Vader’s – Anakin’s? – brief lapse into compassion, Padmé found herself forced to be more careful than ever. She kept her mind blissfully empty, and avoided Palpatine where possible. For the first time in years, she seriously debated trying to leave Coruscant, but it wasn’t possible or realistic. She was a prisoner, as well she knew.

Then, in the dead of the night when Coruscant was as still as it ever got, she heard the familiar catch and hiss of Vader’s breath, and thought she was going to die. 

Padmé had once been the sort of person to keep a blaster by her bedside table. But prisoners weren’t really supposed to be armed. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d held a weapon. It had probably been somewhere around the last time she’d felt safe, before Darth Vader was anything more than a bad dream.

“Make it quick,” she told him, and was treated to the terrifying sound of Vader laughing. 

“I never thought I would hear that from you.” 

And she laughed too, because there wasn’t really anything else to be done. He was a terrifying monster from her nightmares and he was the man she’d once loved and there wasn’t really anything else for it but to laugh. 

He let her regain her composure before asking, “Organa’s daughter… do you know anything about her?”

He’d been watching Leia of course, because Padmé had been. She cursed herself for any danger she might have brought to Bail’s house.

“She is in no danger from me,” Vader assured, and when she turned the lights on, Padmé found that he was standing against the wall, almost leaning, like a dream of how Anakin had once stood in the very same room. Had it truly been eighteen years? On some planets, their child would be an adult by now. 

A thought occurred to her then, a mad, absolutely desperate one, and she knew, with perfect clarity, exactly why Vader was standing in her bedroom in the middle of the night asking for answers about Leia Organa. 

“You told me our child was dead.” She could taste ash in her mouth and her voice was cold. 

“They were! I saw…”

His voice trailed off, and she could hear so much of Anakin in him, under everything. 

She voiced the question that she had been holding inside for so many years. “Why don’t either of us remember the child’s sex?”

It wasn’t that she remembered Anakin telling her the child was non-binary or intersex; it was that the information didn’t stick. No matter how hard she tried to think of it, she was sure that neither of them had ever known. How was that? How had she never had a medical droid tell her? Why didn’t she know?

“Obi-Wan told me the child was dead, when I arrived. That was the phrasing he used, ‘the child’, and I assumed…”

Possible, or maybe, “was he trying to protect someone? Someone other than me, I mean?”

The silence radiating from Vader was punctuated only by the hiss of his breathing. Padmé took off her nightgown and put on her only remaining pair of sensible pants. It was nothing he hadn’t seen before, after all. 

“The Organas are good people,” she said, “if they did this, they did this out of love for Leia, and for me. Not as part of whatever grand conspiracy you’re imagining.”

Again the stilted silence between them. 

Padmé spoke again. “If she is… if there’s any remote chance she is, and you hurt Bail and Breha, she will never, ever forgive you.”

“Did they keep her from you? All this time?”

“Everyone was kept from me!” She snapped, surprised by how emotion had coloured her voice. When was the last time she had allowed herself to feel all the anger that she was entitled to? Her hatred of Palpatine, of Vader, of all the imperial lackeys, of every minute of the last eighteen years. It was hot and red and she felt like she imagined Mace Windu had, at the height of his power. “I had nobody! And I couldn’t. I pushed every single person I had left who I loved away because I knew you and him would ruin them. Like you killed Obi-Wan. Like Palpatine destroyed Anakin. I could have nothing and nobody and you did this!” 

He stepped towards her and she shoved him, hands on his chest plate, into the wall. 

There was an awful silence where Padmé was sure she was going to die. Instead, Vader said, “you will no longer be able to stay here. Fill a carrier bag with any belongings of value to you.”

If he wanted her dead, he only had to draw his lightsaber and do the deed. Or raise his hand. The emperor would hardly have objected. 

“Where am I going?”

“I think it will probably be better for both of us if I don’t know the answer to that question.”

\--

The disappearance of Padmé Amidala was perhaps the last great scandal of the Galactic Senate before it was disbanded. The general consensus was that Vader had killed her. Their years of cold and bitter hatred had finally flared into a single moment of hot passion, and one of the last of the great Clone War Senators was finally gone. She had been an imitation of her former self, like a piece of costume jewellery, for many years, but she had still meant something. There were riots on Naboo, the Emperor’s very homeworld, and the Gungan representative to the Senate was arrested for sedition. Fashion designers across the galaxy wept into their now-slimmer purses.

In the royal palace on Alderaan, the Organas mourned fiercely, and wondered what to tell their daughter.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next chapter next week, we get to see life off of Coruscant (and, perhaps, finally get a few of those answers Padmé has been waiting for for so very long.


	2. Freedom

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Padmé makes her way to Tatooine, and meets up with a series of very interesting people.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW/TW: mentions of past canon-typical violence. Mentions of assumed (not actual) death of a child.

The decision of where to go was a difficult one. Padmé had no allies, no knowledge of the opponents of the Empire. Even if she had, she suspected they would not trust her. She herself could hardly trust Vader’s sincerity in helping her escape, and if it were still Anakin, in there somewhere, she could not trust that it would remain so. The only person she reliably knew was Thrawn, and the need to avoid him was certain. 

She considered the list of worlds she knew how to navigate, considered which of them she would be recognized on, and realized there was an obvious choice. For the first time in decades, Padmé Amidala went to her homeworld by marriage: Tatooine. It was a hive of scum and villainy in ways that suited her purpose. Her republic credits weren’t worth much there, but her jewels were, and it was easy for her to sell her every possession – ship, jewels, even her clothes in case there was a tracker in them – and buy a more incognito wardrobe and a blaster. 

Three days after her arrival, just before she was about to book passage out on a particularly miserable-looking ship, some bandits who’d heard that she was rich tried to kill her. Padmé made very good use of her blaster, and even better use of the hand-to-hand combat she’d learned from Lirel.

The man who’d been about to sell her passage out of here said, “kriffing hells, lady, I’ll give you passage half-off if you help me complete the next job I’ve got.”

“Three-quarters off and I want half-share from the job,” she said, blaster still in hand, and he grinned. 

“Han,” he said, and then, “Third-share from the job. I have a co-pilot.”

And she named herself the first thing that came to mind on this dust-covered world. “Shmi.” And shook his hand.

They came close to making and lost a dozen fortunes over the next year, and Padmé never looked back. She couldn’t. If she occasionally slipped tips – and her share of their slim profits – to rebel informants in bars all across the galaxy, well, that was her business.

\--

The rebel networks were all a-titter with the rumour that Padmé Amidala had been seen, on any one of a hundred worlds. That she walked among them. Ahsoka Tano and Bail Organa both smiled to hear that news. On his way to meet an informant who allegedly knew something about an imperial superweapon, Cassian Andor couldn’t have cared less. He had no idea that he’d spoken to Amidala herself, two weeks earlier, on an unrelated mission.

\--

“My basic point,” Han was saying, as they sat in the cantina back on Tatooine – they’d come here to lick some wounds after his latest harebrained scheme – “is that we could absolutely convince people that you’re my mother.”

“I’m not that much older than you, poodoo-for-brains.” She was probably old enough to be his mother, though she would have had to have had the child very young, she thought. In truth, she wasn’t completely sure how old Han was. The only thing she knew for certain was that Chewie was a great deal older than both of them. 

“Sure, but you’re definitely old enough to be my mother. For the con, anyways. You can get a wig or something.” Padmé’s current hair was short, spikey, and dyed blue, which she thought made her seem both younger and older than her years.

“I’m going to the ‘fresher, and when I come back, you’re never going to mention this plan again.”

As it turned out, she was right about that, but not for the reasons she’d been expecting. 

\--

For Obi-Wan, the story began something like this: Padmé Amidala gave birth to two children, in a cold, uninviting hospital room, and she said to him, 

“Palpatine won’t let us raise them. He won’t. He’ll kill them, or turn them into him. You can’t let that happen.”

“We can get you out of here.” 

“He’ll never stop looking for me. You have to go. Please.”

“And what happens to you?”

He was so alone, so grief-stricken, that losing Padmé seemed unbearable. But she shared none of his fear, none of his doubt. In spite of all the blood she had lost and how near she had come to death, the look on her face was one of ashen resolve. “You make me forget.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Make me forget. Forget all of this. That they’re twins, what I named them, that Bail is here. Make it like I never woke up from Mustafar. And then wipe the medi-droids and input that it was one child, stillborn. Anakin had visions of death. He won’t question it when it confirms his biases.”

Padmé was strong-willed, and had a strong mind. Normally, that sort of trick shouldn’t have worked on her. But if she wanted it… truly, desperately, wanted it… that was a different matter. 

“And Luke? Leia?”

She took his hand and squeezed it, tight as she could. “I trust you. If he were in his right mind, Anakin would too.”

And there, with their hands clasped together, Obi-Wan spoke in gentle tones as he willed her to forget, and to sleep. It felt like the worst thing he had ever done with the Force. Bail wiped the droids with him, and took Leia away. 

Anakin arrived before Obi-Wan and Luke could leave. So, he hid Luke in the ship, and prepared himself to fight.

They fought as brutally as they had on Mustafar, but Anakin was slowed now, unsteady with his new limbs. How long had he even been out of surgery? Obi-Wan thought it was likely that he’d come to kill them the very second he woke. 

Obi-Wan could have won this fight easily. That was the honest truth. But he needed something stronger, something better, to ensure that nobody would ever come looking for him and Luke. He knew how Palpatine had taken Anakin from him, with lies and manipulation, and knew that if Luke was anywhere near half as powerful as his father, he would be targeted for the same fate. 

And so, remembering a long-ago battle on Naboo, he led Anakin around the hospital until he found what he wanted, a long fall down into what looked to be a central computer database. Then, when Anakin next slashed his lightsaber horizontally, Obi-Wan let it hit him, slicing shallowly across the skin of his abdomen in a perfect and ironic match to the scar on Padmé’s, and, with a shout as if he’d been bisected, he let himself fall, just as Maul had all those years earlier. Sometimes it paid to learn from your mistakes. 

Anakin was in a tremendous amount of pain, desperate to find his wife and child, and arrogant enough to assume he could kill Obi-Wan Kenobi. While the medical droids patched Obi-Wan up and took him to the supply bay where his ship was waiting, Anakin was rampaging, screaming and raving as he discovered the lie they’d laid out for him. He destroyed the droids who had helped Obi-Wan in fury, and with them any evidence of the lie.

It was a perfectly executed plan, and for the next nineteen years, nearly everybody – Maul, paranoid bastard, being a noted exception – in the galaxy assumed that Obi-Wan was dead. 

But all of this is to say, when Obi-Wan walked into a cantina on Tatooine with Padmé’s son, on his way to rescue her daughter, and saw the woman herself emerge from the ‘fresher, it was hard to say which of them was more utterly shocked to see the other. 

\--

Padmé processed everything at nearly the same moment. That Han had just killed someone – classy, Han – that he was standing now and waiting for her with an old man and a teenage boy. That the boy looked rather like Anakin. That the man was wearing Jedi-esque robes. And then she recognized Obi-Wan, realized that the reason Anakin couldn’t remember the sex of the child was because it was twins, and hurled herself at Obi-Wan to throw her arms around him.

It was the only genuinely good hug Padmé had received since before she had children. Once Obi-Wan recovered from the shock of seeing her there, he returned it fiercely, letting her bury her head in his robes and weep. 

Later, back on the Falcon, they sat together on her bunk, holding hands, and Obi-Wan asked, “how did you escape? I heard that you were gone, but they thought that Vader had killed you.”

She told him the truth, that Anakin had let her go, and he shook his head. “I’ve had to accept that there is nothing of Anakin left in him. You should do the same.”

And she had. Normally, she thought of them as two different people, but now she said, “you haven’t been there. Not like I have. Whatever of Anakin is left in him, he still feels something. For me, for Ahsoka, for Leia.”

“And now he has Leia prisoner.”

“We’ll see what becomes of that.”

\--

If asked for her impression of Padmé Amidala, Leia would have remembered the way her father had always talked about her, like a queen from a children’s story come to life, brave and powerful and kind. 

When she first met Padmé in person, she said to Bail, “she isn’t anything like the stories you told me, is she? She’s not brave or defiant, not anymore. She’s just… one of them.”

“You’re wrong,” He said. It was something he rarely told her in as many words. “Next time you go to a senate party, watch the way she moves through the room. This is a woman who was an ally of the Jedi. Her friends were… traitors, and they were killed, and she lost someone very dear at the hands of Vader. And you will never see her flinch away. You will never see her bow her head. They remember who she is because she forces them to remember. It would be far easier if she would disappear, or fade away and die. But she refuses to do so. If they want her to go away, they are going to have to kill her. That is how I know she is brave.”

And then Padmé vanished, and Leia’s father cried, looking more vulnerable than she had ever seen, and he said, “I thought… somehow, I thought there was a sliver of hope that she might make it out of this.”

So that was Leia’s impression of Padmé Amidala. A brave woman, defiant and gone. A woman whose fate she would share, if she failed in her mission. When she stood in front of Vader, she wondered if this was how Padmé had died. 

\--

The plan was for Padmé to stay on the ship and get them away if it came to that. She wasn’t as good a pilot as Han or Chewie – or Luke, if he was to be believed – but she wasn’t going to manage to disguise herself as a stormtrooper either, given her height and her voice. 

That plan lasted all of about five minutes, until she was sure the others were gone, before she went to look for Vader. Padmé had a suspicion that was what Obi-Wan had planned to do as well, but what he had in his own gifts with the force, she made up for with one simple attribute: Vader was looking for her too. 

They met in a corridor, surrounded by stormtroopers, and he raised his fist to stop them from shooting her dead. She placed her blaster on the floor; it was not the defence she needed

Obliquely, he said, “Senator Amidala. I hope you found the answers you were looking for.”

He must have meant Leia. She wondered if his continued uncertainty was the reason why they still had a planet to be in orbit around. If the rumours among the rebellion, and those Artoo had told her, were true, the weapon they were standing in was a true monstrosity. A planet-killer. 

“Twins,” she said, and she could somehow sense the shock on his face even through his mask. “A boy and a girl. I asked Obi-Wan to take away those memories. To take away the children.”

She was sure it was Anakin who spoke then, rather than Vader. “But he died.”

“As much as our daughter did that day.” Which was to say, not at all. 

Vader said nothing, and Padmé pressed, “you are still in there, Ani. I know you are.” For the first time in nearly two decades, she was utterly certain. She extended her hand to him. “Come with me.”

“And go where? To the Rebel Alliance?” He still said the name with Vader-esque cold sarcasm. 

“Anywhere we want. We can finally end the slave trade in the outer rim. We can liberate the imperial prison camps. We can explore Unknown Regions. Imagine the horror of our mutual friend if we were to discover his secret homeworld. Or we can just buy a farm on some planet in Wild Space and grow stonefruit and you can fix the neighbours’ speeders. I don’t care. Just come with me. I am tired of being symbols of the republic and the empire. I just want to be us.”

For a fraction of second, Padmé thought she was dead. She heard a blaster discharge behind her. But just as fast there was the buzz of a lightsaber, and Vader jumped about a foot as Obi-Wan emerged from around the corner. The stormtrooper who had fired stared in horror at his hands. 

“Leave us!” Vader ordered, and the stormtroopers fled. 

The Jedi stared at each other. 

“That was a lovely speech, Padmé,” Obi-Wan said, in his Negotiator Voice. 

“The offer extends to you, if you haven’t gotten sick of living on the edges of civilization yet.”

She never lowered the hand she had extended to Anakin.

Vader said, “I killed you.”

“I’m sorry you had to believe that.” He sounded genuinely regretful. 

“Tell him about Luke,” she urged him. 

To her surprise, Obi-Wan actually started rambling. “He’s a devil, that one. Brilliant on a speeder, good shot with a blaster. His aunt and uncle wouldn’t let him try podracing, thank the Force. He wants to be a pilot and get off Tatooine like his life depends on it. Wanted to go to the Imperial Academy but that wouldn’t have been safe for him.”

“No,” Vader said, “it would not.”

Inspired now, Padmé turned to him and said, “and Leia?”

“Safe. Not particularly happy with me, at the moment, but I haven’t allowed Tarkin to destroy her planet yet, so I suppose my parenting isn’t... explosively bad.”

There was the sound of a great deal of blasterfire in the distance, including the louder explosions associated with Chewie’s bowcaster. Padmé thrust her hand forward more forcefully and pleaded, “come with us, Ani. Please. Palpatine doesn’t get to win this one. I won’t let him.”

Obi-Wan urged, “the Force doesn’t care what you’ve done. It only cares what you can do, what you choose to do.”

“This isn’t the kind of story where a man like me deserves a happy ending.” But something in him shifted, and he said, “but the people of Alderaan do.” There was a grim determination in his voice.

R2 had told Padmé about the data he carried, had remembered her as a beloved friend. “There’s a flaw in the Death Star’s construction. A very good pilot could destroy it.”

She could imagine the grin plastered on his face as Anakin said, “I might know where you could get one of those.”

A blasterbolt whizzed around the corner, narrowly missing Obi-Wan. 

“Get back to your ship,” Anakin told them, “I have a vessel of my own to get to. I’ll hail you and you can transmit me the flaw”

Obi-Wan took her hand, and they ran as fast as they could, and it somehow felt better than it ever had twenty years ago when they piled into the Falcon and flew.

\--

Luke didn’t have any idea who Padmé Amidala was, before they ran into her in the Cantina and she hugged Old Ben like they were long lost siblings or something. He didn’t follow senate gossip, and he certainly didn’t follow fashion magazines. 

His first impression of her was that she looked cool. With her haircut and her clothes and the way she displayed her blaster at her hip, he thought she was probably a bounty hunter. He sort of wanted to be her. She seemed radically free from the oppressive life he wanted to escape on Tatooine. 

His second impression of her was that she was funny. The way she teased Han seemed to totally defang him, turning him from an intimidating sort of man who’d just shot someone in front of them to an awkward, blushing weirdo who was being teased by a middle-aged lady. She reminded him just a little of his Aunt Beru, and that hurt in ways he wasn’t ready for. 

The third thing that stuck with him was her ferocity. When they’d reunited on the Death Star and she’d told them that they and an ally – a defector, she’d said – were going to blow up the base, Han had argued that he’d never agreed to any such thing. Padmé and Leia had bullied him into compliance, while Old Ben put a hand on Luke’s shoulder and told him to get down to the gunner’s seat. 

And it was only after this, with the ruins of the Death Star swirling in space (it would rain black ash into the Alderaanian atmosphere for days), that Padmé had turned to Old Ben and said, “you need to be the one to tell them the truth.” And so, grimly and apologetically, he had.

Of Leia and Luke, it was hard to say which of them was more shocked, but it is easy to say that the remainder of their voyage to the rebel base on Yavin 4 was not pleasant. 

\--

They built a house in the middle of nowhere. Well, strictly speaking, Anakin did most of the building. He was still the only one of them with any engineering sense. Padmé did all the clever little tasks that required more dexterity than his hands possessed. She’d learned a lot, in her time with Han. Obi-Wan, who joined them a year later, mostly watched and complained, but she thought he enjoyed having someone to complain to and something to be snippy about. 

It wasn’t what any of them deserved, Padmé knew. She knew that she deserved a chance to know her children, not to be as far from them as she was. She knew that Obi-Wan deserved a hero’s reward for years of service, a return to his home, which no longer existed. Anakin probably deserved a blasterbolt to the head and a punch in the teeth, even after his heroism over Alderaan, so much like it had been years before over Naboo.

And yet, after so many years as symbols – Ghost, Nightmare, Doll – a reprieve was more than called for, in Padmé’s mind. There was a blessing in obscurity, and she was quite happy to accept it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This ending is stupid but what can I say I want things to be soft

**Author's Note:**

> Comments are loved!


End file.
